2008

Mum – non theatrical memories

June 11, 2008 by Christopher Buxton

My mum seemed perfect in every way. Immaculate in person and in her housekeeping. If I close my eyes I always seem to see her in a pretty print frock, sitting darning by the radio in one of the many flats we lived in.

With Dad’s long hours – I remember the shock once of finding him in the bath with his beard shaved off – a lot of my early childhood was just me and my beautiful mum.

In Coventry we’d get on the top floor of a double decker bus and go to Leamington to feed the ducks in the park. In my dreams she would run away from me towards the park gates and the main road. But in reality she was always there. She was a good runner though. She was quite bitter about coming second in the Mum’s race.

In Nottingham when I was ill she lit the fire in my stone flagged bedroom and giant bear shadows roamed the room till she calmed me with stories from King Arthur.

Every evening we’d listen to the Archers – she never listened to it after Nottingham. But I remember the fire at Arkwright Hall.

I remember running out into the garden at Prenton, pursued by Grandma with a tape measure – only because Mum had told me not to allow Grandma to make me any clothes. I hid in the hedge.

She read me all the children’s classics with all the voices. By the time we got to Oxford she’d graduated to Dickens.

In Oxford summer always seemed to come early. She rigged up a washing line in the garden and she taught me to play tennis. After school, we’d often go to Port Meadow, where she taught me to swim in the Thames. When she was sure I could do it, she watched me cross the river and back. A yachtsman continuously cut across my path, thinking it a big joke. Mum stood at the bank in her print cotton dress, ready to dive in and save me.

Skinless sausages and baked beans, liver and bacon, curry with sliced fresh banana on top, pork chops with apple and rosemary – my favourite meals after school along with fruit yoghurt bought in pots from over the Banbury Road – a different flavour to try every day.

Mum was a patient and kind disciplinarian, teaching me with words that it was wrong to eat all the babysitter’s sausages and stab all the oranges with my newly acquired scouting knife.

The first love of my life was Sabrina with a mother as seemingly chaotic as my mother was ordered. Sabrina and I quarreled over which Mum was the poorest. This could only be settled by going through their purses. My mum proved the richer by £1 and fourpence. So that was settled. My mum snorted when she found out and convinced me to my Dickensian satisfaction that our family had the honour of being by far the poorer.

Mum taught me my catechism – it was just like learning lines. Faith is a supernatural gift of God that enables us to believe without doubting whatever God has revealed. And she accompanied me to every obligatory church service including the packed rain soaked smelly St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham. When later I stopped going and lost all confidence in organised religion, it was as if she had done her duty by me and she never visited a church again.

Holidays in a caravan in Devon, where cows licked our bathing suits, their rasping tongues by the washing line keeping us awake during the night.

My mum hated Birmingham. The racist greengrocer called her love and asked if she wanted company when Dad was away. Once she was propositioned outside a cinema near Digby waiting for me to see Dr Strangelove. I would come home from my hell of school to the damp cavernous flat and have nothing to do except read. Mum suggested to Dad he did something with me. And so came our first real bonding – on the long walk to the Hawthorns and the long bus ride to St Andrews.

Mum spent one holiday when she was not working reading me Gormenghast.

I didn’t buy a guitar to punish my ma.

My years of teenage rebellion were directed at my incense heavy school, encouraged by Mum’s increasingly revolutionary take on the world.

I used to listen to Pick of the Pops in the breakfast room in quiet isolation – because I thought Mum and Dad didn’t like pop music. Though I discovered in London Mum did like Tom Jones – but she worried whether he would keep his voice. When we had our first gramophone they bought me some Shadows records.

She wasn’t too keen on my long hair though but only raised the subject when I was at my most vulnerable – in the bath.

She was very caring about my teenage angst. Though I was very protective in the information I gave her.

So my engagement came as a shock. I phoned the news from a public telephone cabin in Bulgaria. There was a pause. What colour is her hair? A reasonable question – but one difficult to answer. Kind of brown but it gets blonde in the summer was my typically male response after looking through the cabin window to check.

I call these memories non-theatrical because Mum and Dad belonged to an exclusive club that I was on the fringes of. Mum only had one friend in my memory who was not in the business. And that proved a harum- scarum aberration with wild excursions way outside my mother’s comfort zone.

All these memories only provide clues to an intensely private and fascinating person. Over this year I have gazed often at her ever changing face and to her expressive hands. There was so much more to know: so much more to find out.
The rain it raineth every day

June 4, 2008 by Christopher Buxton

My auntie Billie (the tomboy of the family) has written a letter full of wonderful memories and Dad has read it to Mum – using his magnifying glass, stumbling sometimes over unfamiliar Devon placenames. We think Mum hears it, though her eyes remain closed. Later she moves restlessly and tries to speak. Her mouth is dry so we give her water, poking the straw between her side lips. Two faint words sounding like cake and biscuit are repeated over and over. I so want to dash down to the shop and get some celophane wrapped slice of fruit cake but know that this would likely choke her. She holds her hands and new incoherent phrases come tumbling out as Dad urges Diction Monica! Articulate those consonants in his best director’s voice.

Two hours we sit spellbound by my mother’s changing face and her attempts to communicate. You have such expressive hands, Monica, says Dad.

Suddenly three questions emerge clearly from Mum’s lips: Where am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? In the face of these unanswerable questions it is easier to retreat to the now open treasure chest of memories.

Mum hardly remembers Torquay – her birthplace – and as a child I feel we always seemed to deliberately avoid it as a place that had been irredemably spoiled. But the story of Billie riding in the removal van from Torquay to Exeter was always a fixture in family memories – as were the bicycles lined up outside the house for Sunday excursions. These memories are so visual that they seem to become my memories too – except of course I see the actors as much older in the way I knew them. So on that ill fated bicycle excursion when it bucketed with rain, I can still see the drip drip drip of water falling from Grandad’s cap onto his nose and his silent resignation – the memory so vivid as if I were there, though of course it stars the older Grandad I knew.

Do the banisters in the Exeter house still bear my mother’s teethmarks? The pleasures of a large family is that there is always an aunt or uncle ready to spill the beans on the naughtiness of your parents. The inconvenient misdemeanours of an only child can remain a frustrating secret for his or her children. Though I expect Auntie Billie could tell a tale about how Peter and I disappeared for an entire Sunday morning only to be found by Uncle Reg in his car touring the Woolston foreshore.

Auntie Billie mentions Dad driving a sporty little car. I must have been very young then. I never associated Dad with sporty cars.

Billie’s picnics though were always the stuff of family legend – it was as if she brought a magic hamper on every trip. I can just imagine us tucking into such a spread on the floor of the Whiteparish cottage after trip to Nomansland was rained off.
My mother of a thousand faces

May 30, 2008 by Christopher Buxton

My mother, Monica Stewart, is a an actress. In her latest role – a one hander co written by God and Samuel Beckett (posthumously) – she is playing herself: dying.

It is as ever an overwhelming performance and we who sit in the wings strive to understand its complexity.

My mother who was never comfortable being herself now looks like a famine victim. Her eyes are permanently shut. Her arms are now her chief tools of expression, reaching out, grasping, pushing away. As if her deaf ears can now hear her family’s voices, she moves spasmodically – especially to poetry and song. Sometimes it seems she is feeling sharp pangs of pleasure or pain and her lips move as if trying to tell us something. But all that emerges is the occasional cry that baffles the audience and keeps them on the edge of their plastic seats over the two hours of visiting time.

Mum, we want to know what is happening in that dark hallway you now inhabit. It is what every human wants to know. And it is why we take these hours as a performance – guessing, wishing, hoping.

Dad has brought your pictures to the ward, and the nurses whisper in temporary respect. Look, Monica was an actress. What remarkable photos!

Dad is the Director, now powerless to control the action. This quiet woman holds the centre of the stage.
May 27, 2008 by Christopher Buxton

Flash – Bulgarian flat for sale in stunning Aitos

Just a couple of steps away from this central square, on a pedestrianised street is a flat with views of the mountains. The flat is on fifth floor of a brick built block with lift. It has a large living room, a bedroom, kitchen -breakfast room and bathroom. Entrance hall gives substantial storage space and there are two balconies – one very large.

Aitos is a sleepy traditional town just twenty miles from Burgas and the seaside. It is ideal for commuting to the big city and returning to traffic free streets and peaceful shady walks. Just above the town there is a large natural park. And compared to the expense and crowded conditions in Burgas and the insecure situation of many village houses, this would make an ideal place to start your Bulgarian adventure.

Price 35,000 euros

Contact: anna.buxton@googlemail.com
Four Hours in KAT Purgatory

May 19, 2008 by Christopher Buxton

Help! I’m turning into Professor Vuchkov
I must stop moaning about life in my beloved Bulgaria

The German expressionist George Grosz has a painting of prisoners exercising in the gaol yard. Pale and flabby, eyes cast downwards, their shoulders weighed down with an awful resignation, they circle beneath a leaden sky, with no destination to lift their eyes or spirits. Their guards are no less trapped. They are part of this grey pointless Horo.

And so to KAT! That man made purgatory where those wishing to drive a car in Bulgaria have to wait for hours in a succession of queues in front of low frosted windows that are seldom opened. Like Grosz’s prisoners we jostle with ever weakening resolve in a contracting space where queues collide and no-one is sure of the final outcome.

Reaching the head of the first queue after an hour, at last we grovel at a low opening. We pray to every God and Kafka that we have been in the correct line. We scrabble in servile haste to provide the requested documentation, always in a panic lest some scrap of paper has been lost. Our backs bent, we twist our necks to understand the comments and instructions that are muttered by a scarcely visible clerk. At last a piece of paper is stamped and we are told to go to Window Number Five in a separate building.

Outside a sun is shining. Half a mile and a world away People are stripping on the beach. Proud Grannies are parading new babies in the park. A teenager is experiencing a first kiss. Heads down, we rush to our next destination. Our progress is followed by the bored eyes of otherwise inactive police officers, who stand in silent groups, probably praying for some outbreak of lunacy, that will disturb the stultifying atmosphere.

Window Number 5 has a crowd of people in front of it, everyone intensely aware of a notice informing us of an impending thirty minute rest-break. Those underpaid and overworked clerks, imprisoned behind their glass walls, are as much part of the demoralizing game as we who wait in queues for their attention.

At Twelve o’clock, the frosted glass snaps shut almost removing our finger tips. We turn away with that feeling of every prisoner about to be returned from exercise yard to their cell. Somehow the outside world seems tainted and we hold on in our constricted space.

Half an hour passes, with each slow second to be calculated like the euro to the lev. At last the glass snaps open with an impatience that brooks no small talk. Anonymous ringed hands shuffle our documents. A brisk stamp and we are sent to join the queue at the State bank counter. Every pleasure must be paid for. Here at least, in contrast to the KAT clerks, the tellers are visible in all their resentful discontent, like bored predators behind a clear glass barrier.

In this queue, there is an opportunity to participate in a non verbal language lesson. Drop your head into your shoulders. Lift your bent arm and with your fingers loosely open rotate your hand two inches to the right of your mouth which is drawn downwards in an expressive pout. With this gesture you can convey the helplessness that every Bulgarian feels.

Money finally paid, we are sent to Window number 4. There, we encounter a restless milling group that fills the narrow corridor. There is no queue as it is unclear which of the two closed frosted windows will open as number 4. Something more important than a coffee break must be engaging the clerks on the other side of Alice’s frosted mirror. We can only imagine a fascinating and important discussion taking place between Michka and Kichka about the relative failings of their daughters- in- law, Tonka and Donka, and the ailments of their mothers Tinka and Binka.

A young man, who has shifted from one foot to the other in paroxysms of anxiety, at last plucks up the courage to rap his knuckles on the glass. There is a scream of outrage and one of the windows shoots back. An angry voice demands to know who has dared to knock on the window. Clearly fearing that he will be turned into a toad, the young man gabbles his question. Is he in the right queue? No of course he isn’t. He retires in confusion and the rest of us are warned of the dire consequences of daring to knock again. The window slams shut.

Half an hour passes. Kichka, bored at last by Michka’s endless complaining finds that some completed documents have arrived on her desk. The window shoots back. Two names are called. The lucky pair depart. Another half hour and our bladders are bursting. Someone says there is a toilet just a few feet down the opposite corridor.

However in this looking glass world, the open corridor door bears the legend “Entrance to outside persons strictly forbidden.” Yes the toilet is available to the public but instead of crossing the few feet of corridor, we have to leave the main building, pass through the hangar sized garage and re-enter the corridor through someone’s private office in order to reach the sure fire contender for the coveted title of dirtiest toilet in the Balkans.

There is no lock on the door – no doubt to discourage those who have acquired the explicable desire to cut their wrists in their long wait for documentation.

Back at Window Number 4, a tall slim Russian goddess is talking urgently in English to a plump stumpy westie. It turns out that they are in the wrong queue and they have to return through the hangar garage. Their Mercedes is now fifteenth in line. The hangar presents a tableau of tense inactivity. Groups of drivers stand in one corner awaiting the summons to drive in their shiny new western cars for cursory inspection. Close by the mechanics and vehicle inspectors gaze into space. Opposite them, a veteran police officer chats to a supervisor about better times when drivers of Ladas and Trabants showed proper respect.

God created Purgatory – a place between Heaven and Hell – to give sufficient time to those destined for heaven to contemplate their sins. If heaven in Bulgaria gives drivers the privilege of taking part in the most thrilling dodgem ride in the world, then it is only proper that we pass through the Purgatory of KAT. And Purgatory is temporary. Finally Kichka’s window opens and we hear our names called. The precious documents are clutched to our heart and it as if George Grosz’s prisoners have dissolved into the sunshine streaming from the open door.

Bulgarian roads – repaired by the EU and rutted by building contractors’ lorries await.